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Amazing… can’t believe some articles are asking if she has had plastic surgery!!!! Who cares??? She is a stunning skater!

It was a pretty amazing skate.

Here is the link for the english article I found on Naver
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61P0U120100226

It was an amazing performance, for sure. There is plenty of coverage in the Canadian media. And let’s not forget the courage of the Canadian skater, Joannie Rochette.

Congratulations to Kim and my adopted country!

Plastic surgery? No, no major figure skaters have EVER had THAT before… :)

Why is her name always mis-transliterated? Her name is 김연아 and so should be spelled Kim Yeon-Ah but I’ve only ever seen it spelled in such a way that either confuses which syllable the ‘n’ is in, or makes it sound like her name is Kim Yoo-na or even Oona. What’s the deal?

designedbyfusion,

Many Koreans choose the Romanized way to do their names on their own, before they have enough exposure to English to know the pitfalls of choosing one spelling over the other. The “eo” for 어 is not a popular choice with some people because it ends getting pronounced as two syllables: Yeona might easily be mispronounced as yay-oh-nah. Yŏna might get mispronounced as yoh-nah as soon as you take away the breve. Of course, yuna also has its problems.

I think Yona would have been the best way to go, simply because even the mispronounciation is closer to the original than the other mispronunciations.

And there’s no real need for a hyphen. Someone named Richard doesn’t write their name as Ri-chard. That it’s Yŏn-a/Yeon-a instead of Yŏ-na/Yeo-na is irrelevant when Romanizing in most cases.

Yuna is the older way of ‘romanizing’ Korean names (pre 1990something). Many people these days still follow that system. It’s the reason why you still hear/read the odd ‘P’usan, ‘T’aegu, etc. Heck, my wife’s university still writes its name as Yeungnam (영남 = Yeongnam)

You’re not alone, though, James… It REALLY irks me to here people in the west pronounce it as Yoona. It should be written as Yeona (with an ‘h’ if you please), but then you’d be hearing everyone abroad saying YEEOna. Which is worse? hehe

Ian, I think you’re mixing up the pre-2002 system (adopted around 1984 in preparation for the Olympics) with the more hodgepodge way of spelling things, which is what Yu-na is.

The “Olympic system” is based on McCune-Reischauer, and 연아 would be written as Yŏna, or Yona without the breve.

The pre-2002 system (which was developed in the 1990s -.-) is the system I was referring to when citing the examples Taegu, Pusan, and Yuna. I have never seen anybody in Korea use the McCune-Reischauer system when writing their name, and I still see a LOT of people using the pre-2002 system. Yeona or her parents would have given her the romanization “Yuna”. I just hate hearing everyone who speaks English referring to her as “Yoona”.

I’m a bit confused. The system you refer to as “the pre-2002 sytems” is a form of McCune-Reischauer. Lots of people were transliterating their names with that, but usually without the breve. Anybody who’s a Kim is using M-R.

Here is how she got her name Yu-Na, as told by her mother, Park Mi-Hee, in an interview.

“Koreans do not always follow the conventional romanization guidelines of proper names when they spell their names in English, and Yu-Na was not different from other ordinary Koreans. When she was a fourth grader, she applied for a passport to train overseas and spelled her given name in English as Yun-a, instead of Yeon-A. Then a government employee made an error in the name (as Yu-Na, instead of Yun-a) on her passport. Her mother first suggested that she would correct the error, but Yu-Na thought Yu-Na would be easier for non-Korean speakers to pronounce, and on top of that, she liked the name Yu-Na as is. Since then, non-Korean speakers have called her Yu-Na Kim.